The 9th Girl

by Tami Hoag

  But he couldn’t tell his parents any of that . . . or anything else about his life.

  He dug his cell phone out from under his pillow, went to his contacts, and touched a name.

  The phone on the other end rang and rang and went to voice mail. Again. Kyle ended the call without leaving a message and went to his text messages instead. The message he had first sent late two nights before, then again and again and again, remained unanswered.

  Where r u? R u ok?

  He sent it again, just in case.

  No answer returned.

  The voices downstairs were droning on. Kyle got up and stuck his head out in the hall. R.J.’s door was closed, his television mumbling on the other side. With the coast clear, he went down the hall to the bathroom, locked himself inside, and turned on the shower as hot as he could stand it.

  The water stung the abrasions on his face and his knuckles but soothed some of the aches in his body. He examined himself as he dried off. The bruises were starting to come to the surface. At least that was all he had—bruises. No broken bones. No open wounds to try to explain away. The worst of the damage was invisible. The damage done to his heart, to his spirit. The thousand cuts of cruel words.

  Why did people have to be so full of hate and ignorance? Why couldn’t they just let everyone be who they were?

  He glanced over his shoulder at his reflection in the mirror and the two small symbols tattooed on his shoulder. This was what he believed so strongly that he had saved up his own money and had the ideal etched into his flesh with ink: acceptance.

  11

  “Which one of you is the ‘source close to the investigation’?”

  Captain Ullrich Kasselmann sat behind his desk looking like a banker: well-tailored charcoal suit, crisp white shirt, stylish orange tie knotted just so, every silver hair in place. Only the faintest sheen of perspiration on his forehead suggested he even noticed that the office was as hot as Florida in August.

  Kasselmann was a man with a solid build and an immovable, brick-wall quality about him that was a physical manifestation of his character. He’d been the head of the Criminal Investigative Division long enough to have substantiated his initial paranoia regarding his employees.

  “Don’t look at me,” Tinks said irritably. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  Kovac gave her a sideways glance. She looked like maybe she had tried to catch an hour’s sleep on a bench at a bus stop—hair more disheveled than usual, dark smudges under bloodshot eyes, pasty complexion.

  “The lead story on the early morning news, channels five and eleven,” Kasselmann said. “‘Zombie Possible Victim of Serial Killer.’ You don’t know anything about that?”

  He turned his laser gaze on Kovac.

  “Yeah, right,” Kovac said sarcastically. “I have such a close personal relationship with the media.”

  Kasselmann was poker-faced. “Then who?”

  “How should I know?” Kovac asked. “Call Culbertson,” he said, readily throwing the ME’s investigator under the bus. Culbertson didn’t answer to Kasselmann. Nothing would come of it. And frankly, Steve Culbertson loved to play the role of subversive. This could work out for everyone.

  “Is it true?” the captain asked.

  “Could be. Yes. Definitely could be,” Kovac said, resisting the urge to glance again at his partner. Liska had argued against the possibility of Zombie Doe being one of Doc Holiday’s victims. She said nothing now.

  “New Year’s Eve, stabbed repeatedly, sexual overtones, facial disfigurement,” he said. “More pieces fit than don’t.”

  “She came out of the trunk of a car,” Kasselmann said. “In traffic.”

  “Looks like the car hit a pothole, the trunk popped open, and the body bounced out,” Kovac said. “Then again, Möller says there’s a slim chance she might have still been alive at the time. Maybe she escaped. It certainly wasn’t anybody’s plan for her to get out of that trunk when she did.”

  “We don’t have a plate on the car?”

  “The limo driver was distracted. He’s coming in today to get hypnotized.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’ll come up with something.”

  “But you’re not hopeful.”

  “He had two hot half-naked babes making out with each other in his backseat. What do you think he was looking at?”

  Kasselmann heaved a sigh, disapproval set in the chiseled lines of his face. “I’ve had phone calls from three deputy chiefs already this morning. And I’ve been called to the chief’s office for an urgent meeting in twenty minutes. He’s not going to be in a good mood.”

  “Yeah?” Liska piped up aggressively. “Well, imagine what a good mood he’d be in if this was his daughter lying on a slab in the morgue with her face burned off from the acid her killer tried to force down her throat. He should think about that, shouldn’t he?”

  Kasselmann’s silver brows climbed his forehead.

  “This is somebody’s daughter,” she went on emphatically. “Just like Rose Reiser was someone’s daughter, and the victim from Iowa—who was not only someone’s daughter but someone’s mother. The chief should maybe think about those things, shouldn’t he?”

  “You seem to have an ax to grind, Sergeant,” Kasselmann said.

  “I’m a mother. I’m a woman. Do I need something more than a vagina to be outraged that we’re letting a serial killer run around loose destroying the lives of young women because the mayor doesn’t want his constituents to think we live in a dangerous place?”

  The captain looked pointedly at Kovac.

  Kovac spread his hands. “What? You think I have some control over her? She’s gonna go fifty shades of whoop-ass all over the both of us.”

  “Rein it in,” Kasselmann warned, turning his attention to the offender.

  Tinks looked like she might just hurl herself across his desk and bite an ear off him. Kovac stepped a little in front of her, cutting off her direct route.

  “I’m not saying we don’t want this case solved—or the other two, for that matter,” Kasselmann said. “But there are considerations to be made in how we go about doing it and how it gets presented to the public. There are protocols to be considered. There are proper channels to go through. The two of you have been at this long enough to know better than to end-around the brass on a high-profile case.”

  No one pointed out that it hadn’t been a high-profile case until now, until the sensational headline.

  “Look, boss, the horse is out of the barn,” Kovac said. “We’ve just got to deal with this and go forward. I need manpower. We’ve got to identify this vic. All I’ve got to go on at this point is a tattoo. I need people canvassing the local ink shops. I need eyes going over the other cases, looking for some kind of thread.”

  “You want a task force.”

  “I don’t care what you call it.”

  “Our hand is being forced now,” Kasselmann said. “The public is going to expect a task force. The media is going to be crawling up our asses like cheap underwear. You know how this goes. You went through this with the Cremator cases. You want to do that again?”

  “Like I want a colonoscopy,” Kovac admitted. “I just want to run my investigation. I want the time and the warm bodies to do it right. Why should anybody be against that?”

  Kasselmann pushed to his feet. “Because it costs money. Because a multi-agency task force is a logistical nightmare. Because it draws the wrong kind of attention—”

  Liska stepped back into the fray. “And a dead girl with no face doesn’t? With all due respect, sir, that is fucked-up.”

  The captain gave her a hard-eyed stare. Liska pushed it right back at him. Kovac held his breath, feeling like he was caught between a she-wolf and an angry bull.

  Kasselmann blinked first. He looked at Kovac. “Set up a room. You get Tippen and Elwood for starters. The rest remains to be seen. I have a meeting to get to.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I don’t want anybody talking
to the press about anything. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Redistribute whatever other cases you’ve got going on that aren’t a priority.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kovac said, wondering just which murder on his caseload wasn’t a priority and how he would explain that to the families involved. Maybe he would foist off some of his assaults on a couple of the younger guys.

  He put the matter to the back of his mind and herded Liska out of the captain’s office and past the cubicles, steering her into the conference room he and Tippen had set up the night before.

  “Do I need to inject coffee into you intravenously?” he asked, shrugging out of his sport coat. “Or would you prefer the hair of the dog? In which case we should leave the building because, despite all evidence to the contrary, I would prefer not to be fired and lose my pension.”

  “I’m not hungover.”

  Kovac raised an eyebrow as he rolled up his shirtsleeves. “How long have we known each other?”

  “All right,” she admitted grudgingly as she slipped out of her wool blazer and hung it on the back of a chair. “I’m a little hungover. And I haven’t slept in two days,” she confessed, melting into a chair at the long table. “I thought a glass of wine might help.”

  “A glass?”

  “A glass . . . as in bottle. Red wine is good for you,” she added defensively.

  “Yeah, you’re the freaking picture of health here. Is this still to do with Kyle?”

  She pulled in a long breath and let it back out. “Yes. Speed tried to talk to him last night, but he didn’t get anywhere.”

  Kovac perched a hip on the table, settling in to offer his sage wisdom. “You’re not going to know everything that goes on in a teenage boy’s life, Tinks. Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  She gave him a look. “Oh, that’s reassuring. Thanks.”

  “What I mean to say is, he’s fifteen. He’s not a little boy anymore.”

  “He’s not a man either.”

  “He’s a guy now. Guys have their own shit going on that they aren’t going to share with their mothers—unless they’re weird or gay.”

  “Spoken like a guy.”

  “See?” he said. “I wouldn’t tell you my shit either.”

  “You don’t have any shit to tell about.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “You don’t get it, Sam,” she said. “Do you know the stuff kids get into today? Drugs, guns, sex. Every day is like another chapter in Lord of the Flies.”

  “At the pansy-ass private brainiac school,” Kovac said. “PSI is not exactly the mean streets. I mean, what are the gangs in that school? The math club versus the science club?” He sat back and held his hands up as if to fend off an attacker. “Ooooooo . . . Look out! They’re packing fountain pens and slide rules!”

  Liska tried to rally up a sense of humor, but the attempted smile looked more like a result of gas pain.

  “Slide rules went out with the dinosaurs, T. rex.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I just don’t want to see him make a hard mistake,” she admitted. A sheen of uncharacteristic tears brightened her eyes. “He’s my baby, Sam. I look at him and I see him when he was two, when he was five, when he was ten. I don’t want him to grow up. I don’t want him to get hurt.”

  “But we all do, Tinks,” Kovac said gently. “That’s part of the deal. We grow up. We make mistakes and we learn from them. That’s how it works.

  “Look at the two of us,” he said. “We smoked weed and drank ’til we puked, and had sex, and flunked algebra. Look how we turned out. We’re not dead. We’re not in prison. We’ve lived long enough to fuck up a million more times.

  “He got in a fight,” he said. “No lives were lost. Let it go. You can’t keep him on a leash like a dog.”

  “It’s so hard.” She put her elbows on the table and rubbed her hands over her face, messing up her makeup.

  “Jesus Christ,” Kovac grumbled with a phony gruffness meant to cover his actual concern. He dug a clean handkerchief out of his hip pocket and offered it to her. “Now you look like the Joker. Go fix yourself, and put your cop face on. We’ve got work to do.”

  Taking the handkerchief, she swept it under each eye and around her mouth, scrubbing off smeared mascara and lipstick. She looked up at the wall with the victim photos, seeing it for the first time and looking like she welcomed the distraction. “What’s all this?”

  “Tip and I did this last night. We wanted to hit the ground running today.”

  He moved off the table for a closer look at the photographs.

  “You’ve got a kid with a black eye,” he said, tapping a finger beneath the sickening close-up of what was left of the face of Zombie Doe. “Someone out there has a daughter who looks like this. Count yourself lucky and get your head in the game, kiddo.”

  Tippen stuck his homely head in the door. “Are we a go?”

  “One way or another,” Kovac said.

  The detective walked in, tossed a bag of bagels on the table, and arched a brow at Liska. “Did you spend the night in the drunk tank or is this a new look for you?”

  She flipped him off.

  “Admitting you have a problem is the first step,” he said, then turned to Kovac. “Sonya e-mailed me her first piece. It’s going up on her blog this morning as soon as we give it the thumbs-up.”

  “Who’s Sonya?” Liska asked, grabbing an iced coffee from the carrier Elwood brought in with him.

  “Tip’s niece,” Kovac said.

  “God help her,” Liska muttered. “I always figured you for someone’s creepy uncle, Tip.”

  “She’s some kind of cyberjournalist,” Kovac explained. “Our liaison to the victim pool.”

  “She’s got a lot of readers,” Tippen said. “And contacts. She’s hooked in to every online page the sixteen- to twentysomethings read. Web news sites, Facebook, Twitter. And she’s reaching out to people she knows in the tattoo business.”

  “She says the tattoo on our vic is the Chinese symbol for acceptance,” Kovac explained to the others as he stood looking at the close-up he had taped to the wall with the rest of the autopsy photos. “She has the same thing on her arm. Apparently, it’s something the young people are doing these days to make a statement.”

  “For kids the victim’s age, that’s not even legal in this state,” Tippen pointed out. “Minors can’t get tattoos, even with parental consent.”

  “Thank God,” Liska said, digging a cinnamon-raisin bagel out of the bag. “Kyle wanted a tattoo for his last birthday. I said absolutely not until he runs away and joins the circus.”

  “It’s an artistic form of self-expression,” Elwood said. “Tattoos are a road map of the bearer’s personal journey.”

  “The kid who works the counter nights at my local convenience store has a tat of a snake wrapped around his throat,” Kovac said. “Apparently, his personal journey took a detour through hell.”

  “Possibly,” Elwood said seriously.

  “The girl I work out with at the gym has a leprechaun on her stomach,” Liska said. “She’s twenty-two and you could bounce quarters off her abs. She thinks it’s cute. I wonder how cute she’ll think it is after she’s had a couple of kids and the thing has morphed into Larry the Cable Guy.”

  “Not everyone gives their choice as much consideration as they should,” Elwood conceded. “Each of my tattoos has a deep personal meaning.”

  Kovac made a face. “Please don’t tell us where they are on your person.”

  “I want to know how the artist negotiated all the body hair,” Tippen said.

  Liska wrinkled her nose. “Eeeww.”

  “I waxed first,” Elwood said nobly, making everyone moan in unison.

  “Speed has that whole sleeve on one arm,” Liska said. “And I get what it means, what it represents for him. The struggle between good and evil; the juxtaposition of himself as the avenging angel or the devil. And, of course, he wants to look badas
s at the gym. But he’s allegedly a grown man, so if he wants to illustrate himself, that’s his choice. Kyle is fifteen. Should a fifteen-year-old permanently etch something into his body?”

  “That depends on what it is,” Elwood said.

  “He’s into comic books and samurai warriors. When he’s an adult and working as an attorney, is he going to thank me for letting him get a giant tattoo of Spider-Man?”

  “What’s more disturbing is that you’d let your kid become a lawyer,” Tippen said. “And you think I’m sick?”

  Kovac brought them back on topic. “So the question here is: If by law minors can’t get a tattoo in this state, and our victim is only fifteen or sixteen, does that mean she came from out of state? Or did she just have a good fake ID? Or are there tattoo artists around town who just don’t give a shit what the law says?”

  “You’re not exactly talking about a group of straight-arrow conformists,” Tippen said.

  “No,” Elwood agreed, “but the majority are very defensive of both their art form and their integrity as businesspeople. The artists I know were glad for the law restricting minors. They want their work to be respected and meaningful, not some idiotic drunk-ass whim.”

  “Sonya tells us this particular tat is about acceptance and tolerance,” Tippen said. “Racial tolerance, religious tolerance, tolerance of sexual preference. It’s a statement, part of a social movement. Given the gravity of the meaning, I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine there could be an artist or two willing to bend the rules to put it on younger kids in order to further the message.”

  “How many tattoo parlors are we talking about?” Kovac asked.

  “About twenty close in on Minneapolis proper,” Elwood said. “Plus St. Paul, plus the outer burbs. And we’re not taking into account that artists will freelance outside the studios. There’s our likely culprit for tattooing underage kids—some young artist trying to make a few extra bucks on the side. This is a simple, straightforward design requiring minimal skill and minimal equipment.”